Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben's Silence

While Agamben's Eurocentrism has been redressed by scholars such as Achille Mbembe ("Necropolitics," 2003), Ranjana Khanna (Algeria Cuts, 2008), Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory, 2009), and Sylvie Thénault (Violence ordinaire dans l'Algérie coloniale, 2012), even his most careful readers do not comment on Agamben's treatment of a word that he takes from Primo Levi as the key to understanding politics and ethics after World War II.2 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben designates the Nazi concentration camp as the "new biopolitical nomos of the modern" and singles out an epithet that had previously appeared only in texts written by or about survivors of the camps: "Now imagine the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant," he urges in the final passages of Homo Sacer. The epithet links Nazi with European imperial violence, but as Agamben founds his ethics on the site where "Jews" were transformed into the ambiguously human figures that he accepts "Muslims" already were, certain victims come to appear (even in their haunting absence) in place of those whose absence never gains the status of an ethical or political problem.